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2016 will be an amazing year for customer experience! C-level executives finally understand the customer experience is a competitive differentiator. In 2016 I predict that video customer service will explode, mobile CRM will get better, software will allow more agents to work "on-demand," IoT will get even more traction in customer experience and data will get better and actually be usable. I've captured these earlier on this post, but here I serve you a quick video version of Blake's Take.

1. Video Customer Service Becomes Popular

Many of us like to talk to people we can make eye contact with--while technology has allowed us to be more impersonal with our customers, it has also allowed us to be more personal with our customers too. It's not a rare day we see people walking around holding their phones a foot from their face (on FaceTime or Skype) so why wouldn't customers enjoy this ease of communication with actual contact center agents? Customers love video in their personal lives, and use it at work, so why wouldn’t customers use it to get customer service help? Amazon pioneered video with their Kindle Mayday offering, but this is just the beginning. For example American Express Co. brought video help to itsiPadapp in February, using technology from Cisco Systems Inc. that supports both one-way and two-way video. Like Amazon, American Express trained agents to inject their own personality into calls. Both baby boomers and millennials like video support, and we will see more companies tapping into the power of video in the next year.

2. CRM Technology Gets Even Better, On Mobile

CRM is getting much better. Technology companies are releasing products that provide easy to use cross-channel CRM technology. This means the agent can engage with the customer on a range of channels without the agent having to leave their screen. They can move with the customer in real-time and trace what the customer’s next steps are. In addition to highly improved CRMs we’re seeing better mobile CRM applications. Rather than a purely mobile version of the CRM desktop software, now agents have a mobile friendly version with improved usability. You can imagine how salespeople would also benefit from not only being able to get customer information on their phone, but use their phone to share presentations and other resources with customers on their phones and tablets in real-time. In 2016 not only will mobile CRMs and software be easier to use, but companies will have the benefit of industry-specific CRMs. You can imagine the demands of a healthcare CRM are much different from that of a finance CRM or a non-profit's CRM. The benefit of a CRM is for an agent to have the ability to look up customer information and provide helpful information to that customer, however so many of our largest enterprises' CRMs are so big they are no longer useful. As I said, the difference between companies that are one step ahead of their customers, and those that are painfully behind is stark. Many companies barely meet the basic needs of customers, and others are very ahead of their competitors. They already know what customers need before their customers do. The latter are rolling out CRM systems with analytics engines behind them that will enable the ability to provide real-time offers to customers based on predicting what they will want next or what kind of product or service they might buy next.